South East London blogzine - things that are happening, things that happened, things that should never have happened. New Cross, Brockley, Deptford and other beauty spots. EMAIL US: transpontine@btinternet.com Transpontine: 'on the other (i.e. the south) side of the bridges over the Thames; pertaining to or like the lurid melodrama played in theatres there in the 19th century'.

Thursday, March 17, 2011

Social Centre Plus - Deptford Tributes

I went down last night to Social Centre Plus, the new 'community anti-cuts space' in the occupied Job Centre on Deptford High Street. I support what they're doing and thought I should go along for their first open day, but must admit I was half expecting it to be just the usual suspects from the smallish pool of Lewisham activists.

So I was delighted to walk in to a big buzzy space with a more diverse slice of the local population than I've seen in one room for ages, kids, pensioners, radical students, old Deptford faces and all. Must have been 100 or so people coming in and out while I was there. A great start with a lot of potential to create some interesting situations.

Deptford Tributes

Showing at the Centre last night was Deptford Tributes, a film by Amanda Egbe & Rastko Novaković first shown in the Deptford X festival in 2009. It follows the river Ravensbourne upstream from Deptford Creek to its source at Keston Ponds, with some great footage filmed while wading in the water. Some of the locations are very familiar to me, such as the Creek, Ladywell Fields and Keston, but it also explored some of the more hidden parts of the river, channelled between concrete round the back of industrial estates in Catford for instance. It also includes interviews with SE London historian Terry Liddle and Julian Kingston - a local boat dweller who lives and keeps bees on Deptford Creek.

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